Documents on Anne Frank
and her Diary

"The
results of tests performed at the BKA laboratories show that
portions of the work [Anne Frank's diary], specially
of the fourth volume, were written with a ballpoint
pen."

- Al
Fredricks, New York Post, October 9, 1980

Anne Frank may not have
inked that famous diary

by Al Fredricks

A REPORT by the German Federal Criminal
Investigation Bureau (BKA) indicates that portions of
The Diary of Anne
Frank had been altered or added
after 1951, casting doubt over the authenticity of the
entire work, the West German news weekly Der Spiegel
has disclosed.

The diary, a day-to-day account of the anguish of a young
Jewish and her family hiding in their Amsterdam home during
the Nazi invasion, has touched the hearts of millions.

The manuscript was examined on orders of a West German
court as of a libel action brought by Otto Frank,
Anne's father and the only family member to survive the
concentration camps, against Ernst Roemer for
spreading the allegation the book was a fraud.

This was the second suit against Roemer, a long-time
critic of the book, by Frank. In the first case, the court
decided in Frank's favor when the testimony of historians
and graphologists sufficed to authenticate the diary.

In April, however, only a short time before Frank's death
on August 19, the manuscript was turned over to techicians
of the BKA [Bundeskriminalamt,
Germany's "FBI"] for examination.

The manuscript, in the form of three hardbound notebooks
and 324 loose pages bound in a fourth notebook, was examined
with special equipment.

The results of tests performed at the BKA laboratories
show that portions of the work, specially of the fourth
volume, were written with a ballpoint pen. Since ballpoint
pens were not available before 1951, the BKA concluded,
those sections must have been added subsequently.
[*]

The examination of the manuscript did not, however,
unearth any conslusive evidence to lay to rest the
speculations about the authenticity of the first three
notebooks.

* Anne Frank fell ill with typhus at the Bergen-Belsen
camp and died in March 1945.